Update: Microsoft says that Steve Ballmer will not be appearing at Apple's WWDC Conference. "Steve Ballmer not speaking at Apple Dev Conf. Nor appearing on Dancing with the Stars. Nor riding in the Belmont. Just FYI," the company said in a post to Twitter.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer will take a seven-minute segment of Steve …

you're pulling my plonker...

your argument makes sense but it's the sight of monkey boy ballmer on stage that would be bad for apple. having the huge mug of silly billy up there all those years ago was bad enough, but apple were in the shit then....

i just think, although it makes sense and google is now THE threat, it would be a bad publicity image to have monkey boy on apple's stage.

OK, but...

I can buy the thesis that Jobs is trying to mitigate any antitrust complaints and also to piss in Adobe's cornflakes, but there's one thing that doesn't sit right:

Microsoft are about to release their own shiny new phone OS, and desperately need as many developers as possible to write software for it. Why would they want to make it easier for such developers - many of whom presumably use MS Visual Studio - to write software for their main rival in the smartphone space?

On the other hand, maybe Ballmer realises that getting existing iPhone developers to use Visual Studio instead of XCode makes it more likely that they will write W7Phone apps too?

Two wrongs don't make a right

I can't deny apple has been successful with it's business model, but it is very sad that they had to do it with such a closed model. I doubt they want to change it now, unless they're feeling some pressure from washington.

"What better for Apple to stress its 'openness' by not only allowing third-parties to create iPhone OS development tools but for the first of them to be the old enemy - a company that now has a smaller market capitalisation than its arch-rival?"

damn...

I'd be absolutely shocked if this happened but after thinking about it, it would actually make sense.

The amount of extra money Apple gets from developers buying a mac just to develop iphone apps must be minimal. The reality is Apple mac sales come from people who are either design based or consumers who just use software. Allowing windows users to develop for iphone/ipad is a win win for Apple and MS. It will accelerate app development on the platform and really f*ck with google.

For MS it's going to be a weird concession to make. Realistically, MS is saying we have no hope of producing a competing ipad like device in the forseeable future so we might as well partner Apple on this. It will also signal a departure from MS's strategy of "finger in every pie" to "lets just eat well" and have them focusing on the core businesses.

As much as Xbox is popular etc.. what has it done for them? They make a bit of money now but lost billions doing it. I dont think Apple have the appetite for that again. Apple have shown that you can grow a company without losing money in the short/medium term. If MS never made anything other than Office + Windows stuff they would probably have more dough and be more profitable. Thats the reality.

Now if MS used with webkit for ie9 and Apple used bing as default search I think google would be petrified... The message would be "dont fu*k with Steve Jobs, you have no idea how far he will go to destroy you"..

Why?

Why does it have to be some sort of Machiavellian conspiracy? Was there ever written somewhere that *nobody* was allowed to use anything but X Code to write iPhone applications? As far as I know, that was the only environment available, so it was just an assumption that many made that it was not possible to use anything else. And we're talking developer tools that build native applications and use the frameworks provided by Apple, not bespoke frameworks and runtime libraries from third-parties.

It seems obvious to me that there was a void in the market, and Microsoft--the other major integrated developer tools provider--jumped in to get a piece of the pie. Has any other tools provider tried this?

£59 not to build an app

Costs...

It'll soon stop developers moaning about the £59 AppStore entry fee. Have you seen the cost of a Visual Studio 2010 development license (£700+)? You could very nearly buy an entire Mac for that money AND you get XCode thrown in.

Perhaps MS should spend time improving their native C++ support in Visual Studio rather than wasting it trying to support 2 new OS's...

I hope they've got plenty of bogs.

There's news, and there's NEWS

"a company that now has a smaller market capitalisation than its arch-rival?"

Apple is now the world's biggest technology company.

Don't you think this deserves a story all to itself, no matter how much crow El Reg has to eat?

A significant bit you don't mention is that with Visual Studio available as an IDE for iThings, it is much easier to create apps for jail broken devices without infringing the EULA that comes with Apple's SDK. Anti-trust will more than likely force Apple to allow users to install apps from outside the AppStore eventually

gritting lorries

Translate to US English: Snow Plows/sand salt trucks (Freezing in Hell). I know it says co.uk at the end. So I am not complaining that I don't always understand the references. I just Google this stuff.

Of course thinking that "Piggly Wiggly" was a fake US grocery chain was comic payback (Relatively big supermarket chain based of course in Alabama, their convenience stores were called Hoggly Woggly. I swear, you can't make this stuff up.)

.Net?

The whole purpose of Microsoft's Visual Studio Suite seems to be to generate .Net code (which is not native Intel), as at least that is the default in VS 2008 Express. Seems to be equally as evil as FLASH.

Erm

Utter Rot

.Net is managed code. Like Java is Managed code.

Managed code is the cornerstone of enterprise computing for the simple fact it mitigates much of the risk of writing large scale applications. e.g. let Microsoft worry about security - it's a moving target anyway. Managed code, also abstracts you away from the device - essential in a world where devices are being replaced and upgraded just as fast as software.

Flash is not managed code in the same sense as Java and .NET are.

Managed code is not evil. Those against it simply because managed technologies do not create native code are in fact extremely stupid. The benefits of managed development technologies are too numerous to list.

Managed technology such as .NET or Flash - is easily the best solution for the majority of mobile phone applications from a development point of view. The only exceptions would be things like realtime graphics/audio applications - and that's where Flash/Silverlight etc come in...